God knows.
The cosmos is vast, but God knows our names and loves us. This is good news. We can trust a God who loves us as an individual and not just abstractly.
God is, but God also loves us: not just corporate us, but you and me as people. The good God knows our deepest pain and our greatest delights and longs for an eternity full of joy with us.
That God exists is true, but might have been bad news or of only philosophical importance. Could God have been all powerful and not good? That’s really what arguments about evil would show if they worked (thank God they do not). God must exist, but God could be uncaring, beyond our ideas of “good” and “evil.” Aristotle correctly saw God as necessary to existence, but the God of Aristotle made life possible without ever considering our lives.
God chose to love us, because the very nature of God is to love! The great value in reason is to see what can be trusted as experience reveals what is and what should be. Revelation gives reason a signpost to experience and reason learns how best to live. We do not think for the sake of thinking, nor does revelation come to us so we can make arguments. Instead, the arguments, the making of books, is so we can flourish. We can live in love.
Here the vastness of the cosmos seems relevant, but is not. The cosmos is vast but finite. What can be counted can be known if the intellegance is vast enough and God knows. Omniscience is the attribute of God that makes a vast cosmos exciting, a place for eternal exploration, and not frightening. God discerns, picks out, numbers, and loves all there was, is, and will be.
Why would God love the people in this small Earth? Why would God care to know your name or my name? God loves all the worlds and any other beings to be found in those worlds. God is expansive love with the power to do all that can be done that He wills and God loves all He has made.
God does not just love you and me, but God does love you and me. A grain of sand at the bottom of the sea is made wet by the water, but that water washes over every grain. God loves all, not just generally, but particularly. Omniscience tied to omnipresence and omnibenevolance means that you and I are loved just as we are, where we are, as we need.
Christina Rossetti, wise in God, understands:
Leaf from Leaf
Leaf from leaf Christ knows;
Himself the Lily and the Rose;
Sheep from sheep Christ tells;
Himself the Shepherd, no one else:
Star and star He names,
Himself outblazing all their flames:
Dove by dove, He calls
To set each on the golden walls:
Drop by drop, He counts
The flood of ocean as it mounts:
Grain by grain, His hand
Number the innumerable sand.
Lord, I lift to Thee
In peace what is and what shall be:
Lord, in peace I trust
To Thee all spirits and all dust.
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